There have been many criticisms and articles over the last year or so noticing that Intel seems to have been a little stuck.
They have struggled with chip manufacturing, product delays, roadmap changes, scandals, changing CEO and upper management. While this has been going on, they have been striving to build one of the first exascale machines based on entirely new hardware
Market CAP also doesn’t tell the full story:
Intel 263B
AMD 93B
NVIDIA 318B
Apple 2000B
ARM 40B (Nvidia take over price)
Intel is the largest semi-conductor manufacturer holding about 80% of the end-user chip market, producing the majority of the CPU’s that we all use and love, and is still the chip manufacturer that everyone compares themselves to. It is hard to understand the incredibly low market cap.
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
NVIDIA is looking to acquire ARM, which would firmly place it as a direct competitor to Intel on all fronts. However this deal is not certain.
After losing ground for the last couple of years, Intel is now heading in the right direction. The media tide is turning. And Intel looks set to sail strongly once more.
Details of Sapphire Rapids are slowly emerging, and indicate it will be a fantastic chip with massive amounts of memory bandwidth to feed all those cores. This will put it on the same standing as A64FX and should deliver impressive performance with all the vendor support and infrastructure you expect from Intel products.
The Xe HPC looks fantastic, and should pack over 40TFlops in a single card, which will take the fight directly to NVIDIA and AMD. It should be the most powerful GPGPU on the market with integration via OneAPI.
With a new CEO who is a tech industry leader, new technology, the world emerging from the COVID19 recession, and a push for the US to build manufacturing capacity within the US, Intel is uniquely positioned to have a fantastic year.
The ship has turned. I look forward to the impact Intel will have over the next 12 to 24 months on the HPC market.
